


Cake by the Ocean

by canadino



Category: One Piece
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-05
Updated: 2016-05-05
Packaged: 2018-06-06 12:39:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6754135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canadino/pseuds/canadino
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zoro eats a lot of cake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cake by the Ocean

Zoro smelled it way before he saw the finished product, the sweet scent of vanilla spongecake and the strawberries bursting out of the jars they were being preserved in. The area around the kitchen was warmer than usual. The atmosphere gave Nami a dreamy look on her face, the biggest fan of fruit desserts, while Chopper and Luffy were decidedly less reserved about their anticipation as they danced across the deck, singing a little ditty Luffy created on the spot. Robin answered his look of skepticism about the whole ordeal by calmly strolling up to the crow’s nest with a book and a thermos of hot tea. Robin was strong, but he approached battles unlike her - he would face things head on, with strong belief in his brute strength. Zoro scampered toward the back of the ship, bringing his swords and weights and placing them strategically across the back deck as if he had just been there a few moments ago but just tragically happened to be elsewhere. Satisfied, he hid in the shadows. 

He liked to lift looking out behind the ship, because beyond keeping watch to make sure no one was trailing them or coming up at their blind spots, it was relaxing to follow the trail the ship left and the water that rushed to the sides, pushed away from the trajectory of the ship. The water ebbed and flowed, revealing their presence in the large, wide sea before folding over itself and returning to the fluid surface of the Grand Line. The white noise also helped him concentrate on his sets. “Found you,” Sanji said. 

Zoro was a practiced swordsman, so he did not jump out of his skin as Usopp or a lesser-honed individual might. He did not nearly swallow his tongue, because that would have been physically very difficult. Sanji was grinning at him, crouched next to him as he had been contemplating the ocean, a white plate of strawberry shortcake in one hand. “Someone might think you were trying to hide from me! I’ve never seen anyone avoid eating my desserts before.”

“Get used to it,” Zoro said. Sanji was still holding the plate of cake out to him. He took it, but because it was the polite thing to do. He put a forkful of cake into his mouth because it was the polite thing to do. The cake itself was soft and moist, the frosting carefully beaten to smoothness that wrapped around the ripe strawberries in a sugary dream. “Yuck. It’s disgusting.”  


“Is it?” Sanji asked. Zoro put another piece into his mouth to make sure.   


“Yep. May as well give it to Chopper. I hate sweet things.” He took one more bite to confirm, yes, the cake was a nasty piece of work. “And you know Luffy doesn’t take his time to brush his teeth, so he’ll get cavities if you keep feeding him stuff like this.” The fourth mouthful left icing along the side of his mouth. How messy and awful. Sanji was no longer squatting next to him, and he had sat down all the way, his back against the wall as he watched Zoro critique his latest creation. One of the strawberries was still sour, which created a drastic taste in his mouth because everything had been so sweet before; Zoro ate another bit to even out this terrible experience. “I can’t do this anymore. Take it away.” He shoved back a plate mostly consisting of a handful of crumbs and the crust of white icing back at Sanji. “Let Luffy lick it clean.”   


“I’m so hurt,” Sanji said, dusting off his ridiculously and unnecessarily long legs. Zoro did not think about them, crossing the expanse of the kitchen in three comfortable strides, crossed when he sat next to Franky when they discussed each week’s assigned chores, the feel of smooth thighs against his ears. Sanji was a man, with hairy calves, but it was as if those hairs reached the cherub bald heads of his knees and reconsidered it. “I guess I won’t save a second slice for you then.”  


“Don’t bother. Like I said, give it to Chopper.”   


Later that night, Zoro felt a little pluckish on night watch. Sanji had made him fried rice as a midnight snack, which he polished off, but Luffy would forgive him for picking at some old leftovers. He opened the fridge and the freezer. There was the residual smell of cream and berries, but it appeared that the entire crew had picked apart that cake. Zoro went back to the crow’s nest and wrapped his blanket around him tighter. Swordsmen ate the north wind for sustenance anyway.

[=]

“This is such a pretty cake,” Chopper cooed, admiring the slice on the plate in front of him. “It looks like you make a cake from a tree! Look at these rings!”  


“It’s called baumkuchen,” Sanji said. “It’s local to a country in North Blue. I’d really appreciate it if you all enjoyed it, since each layer needs to be made one at a time. But especially Nami and Robin...it would really do my heart good if you loved it...and me, for having prepared it...”  


“Can I have a second slice?” Luffy asked, holding out his empty plate. Zoro excused himself from the table without having touched his slice and went out to do his evening weight training.   


“You are so spoiled,” Sanji said fifteen minutes later. He had descended upon Zoro’s land with a new slice of cake. Zoro recognized it as different than the one that had originally been cut for him, because it was slightly smaller. Luffy must have filched the original. “Can’t you eat anything if it isn’t brought out to you?”  


“I’m not hungry,” Zoro insisted, putting his barbells down. He frowned at Sanji, standing in front of him with the baumkuchen. He reached out and took the slice in his hand and ate it quickly so Sanji would go away. Naturally, Sanji did not disappear back to another part of the ship and just stood there, looking at Zoro like he had done a wonderful thing like eat his cooking in his presence. “Now go away. I can’t do any lifting now that I’ve put something in my stomach.”  


“Do you want tea or anything? While you sit and rest, or in my opinion, make excuses not to work out.”   


“If you bring it, leave your comments at home.” Sanji did end up bringing him tea, iced, and stood with him for a little bit before going off to start on dinner. Zoro drank every last drop to stay hydrated and chewed the ice to keep his teeth in shape.   


[=]

“Oh, I can’t possibly,” Nami was saying, although her voice was rising into her insincere falsetto. “That’s so rich, I’ll get fat, surely...”  


“It’s more airy than anything,” Sanji said. There was the sound of his hand against Luffy’s face to keep him from eating it all. “Of course I’ve kept the health of this crew in mind, so this cheesecake is much smaller than what I would make for a full fletched restaurant. Everything in moderation.”  


“You’re on a dessert kick,” Usopp mused. “What are these, syrups?”  


“There’s an orange glaze for Nami, a chocolate sauce, some strawberry syrup made from the leftovers of the strawberry cake we had a while back...”  


Zoro enjoyed the shadows of Nami’s tangerine trees cast on his back, shading him from the sun’s harshest rays. The island they were leaving behind after restocking was starting to become a land mass sliding further and further away. He lived so much of his life on land, it was amazing how much time he was now spending away from it. Those were Sanji’s footsteps in the tangerine grove behind him; they were distinctively light and misleading for a person of considerable stature, the type of weight distribution typical of someone used to shifting around with one foot - or none - on the ground. 

“Eat it,” Sanji commanded, and he watched as Zoro choked down the slice of cheesecake, no toppings. “Savor with whatever tastebuds have developed in that body of yours the ricotta cheese and fine eggs.”  


Zoro ate ice cream cake, marble cake, mille-feuille, pancakes, princess cake, sachertorte, and tiramisu. The sun was in various points in the sky at these different cakes, sometimes high overhead or setting in a golden glow. It affected the direction of the shadows on Sanji’s smug face. The water behind the ship swirled and bubbled as Zoro thought about the sugar levels in his body. He made up for it by taking some laps around the ship. He turned his nose up at Sanji’s spice cake, opera cake, and marble cake. 

He was really going to have a talk to Sanji about this cake trend, Zoro thought as he came out from a refreshing bath to Robin and Nami sharing a considerable slice of dark chocolate cake. This kind of frivolity and abandon was unbecoming of a professional pirate crew. Some of them, like Franky, was washing sugar down with more sugar. It was unforgivable. He would give the cook a piece of his mind once Sanji came up to solicit the sweets into his system. 

“Where’s Cook?” Zoro asked when the person himself did not immediately present himself for his scolding.   


“I think he went to the back of the ship with Chopper,” Luffy sighed, chocolate smeared across his cheeks contently.   


Sanji was sitting on one of his weights - the disrespect paid! - with Chopper on his lap. Chopper was chattering away about the different kinds of sugars that the human body could process as he waved his fork around, careful to pick every piece of chocolate cake from the silverware with his tongue. “What is this?” Zoro demanded.

“Hi, Zoro,” Chopper said. “Sanji and I were just enjoying his delicious chocolate cake. He said cake tastes better if you have something good to look at. No wonder you spend so much time back here! You can see the sky and the water so well and you know it won’t be scary because we passed it already.”  


Zoro felt his lip curl. The stench of chocolate was strong all over the ship and would undoubtedly result in paw prints on his weights. “Please don’t eat around my equipment; water isn’t good for them, and I don’t want to clean them and risk ruining them.”

“Sanji is making sure I’m not making a mess,” Chopper insisted. “I can share with you, if you’d like. Don’t be sad, Zoro; I’ll let you eat this tasty cake too!”  


“I don’t want any,” Zoro sniffed (“More for me!” Chopper said gleefully). He didn’t mind Sanji and Chopper indulging themselves in sweets, but did they have to do it in his space? It didn’t seem enough to Sanji to bother him all the time, but now he was bringing third parties around too. He would not look at him. He would do sit-ups and make them feel guilty. When Zoro sat down in a huff, he heard a wet squelch and something smear against his bottom.   


“Did you really not see that?” Sanji asked, trying valiantly and failing spectacularly to hold back his laughter. Chopper stared at him. There was chocolate cake all over his ass. A genius had decided to put a plate of chocolate cake right in the middle of his weights and he had sat on it. “Go and put your dirty dishes in the sink, Chopper. Spare Zoro face and don’t look at him as you leave.” True to his word, Chopper did not turn around as he went back around to the front of the ship, but the way his scampering quickened up the stairs, Zoro was pretty certain he was about to share everything with everyone.   


“You are a mess,” Sanji said. “If you wanted to have cake alone with me, you could have just said so. You didn't have to make such a big statement about it.”

“It was no such thing,” Zoro sniffed. The cake was going to be a pain to wash out. “Stop bringing it all to me and this wouldn’t have happened.”   


“What else would I do with your share? I make it for everyone to enjoy, as generous as my soul is.”  


“Eat it yourself.”  


Sanji’s eyes dropped to Zoro’s chocolate cake ass. “I might take up that offer if I wasn’t surrounded by things you could crush me with, but maybe later.” His face flashed reckless mirth and he laughed as he ran away as fast as his long legs could carry him. Zoro’s fingers were getting sticky as he was brushing as much cake off himself. He knew about things like acquired taste, but he still hated sweet things. 

**Author's Note:**

> I am obsessed with the damn song. Thanks for reading!


End file.
